just enough to be dangerous

Laura is the co-author of the hugely successful PHP and MySQL Web Development, and a Senior Software Engineer at Mozilla Corporation. Thanks for being the first respondent, Laura.

In terms of PHP, what does quality mean to you?

This is a great question, and one I often ask in interviews.
Quality PHP is free of the usual set of code smells. It's been
through code review and has a set of meaningful tests with a
reasonable level of code coverage. It has minimal but sufficient
documentation. You can detect good quality PHP by looking for:

happy developers

new developers becoming productive quickly

other users forking or contributing to your projects

your application being robust and not failing in odd and intermittent ways

devs are able to modify the code and add features quickly, without forensic spelunking to understand how it works

your code lacking that fragile library that nobody wants to maintain or modify in case they break it

What tools and processes do you use in your development to ensure quality?

The main things we do are:

Patch review. (This is common among open source projects.) Writing code that you know will be read by others ups the quality in general.

Security review for new projects or features.

Continuous integration and automated test-on-build.

Mozilla's awesome WebQA team run a set of automated tests using Selenium, fuzzers, and also do a lot of manual testing.

Are there tools or processes that you'd like to include in your toolbox that you haven't used yet?

We're looking at moving towards continuous deployment during the next few months and are currently exploring the requirements for that.